The History of Moviegoing, Exhibition, and Reception—or HoMER—Project was founded by an international group of cinema scholars in June 2004.

It aims to promote understanding of the complex, international phenomena of film going, exhibition, and reception through several means:

• Collection, scholarly vetting, and sharing, via the world wide web, of new data on film going, exhibition, and reception;
• Creation of a portal website that brings these new datasets together and, ideally, makes them cross searchable;
• Dissemination of new models of collaborative research in the humanities that incorporate faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates in long-term projects, and the development of new ways to incorporate such research into cinema studies and cultural history classrooms;
• Support for a variety of means of publishing research findings, with particular focus on electronic publication of working papers, works in progress, and unconventionally formatted works that are difficult or impossible to publish on paper—e.g., works that use graphic imaging software for multilayered mapping or works that are very heavily illustrated.